Inside Klim Type Foundry, the Wellington typeface studio behind the world’s biggest brands
Kris Sowersby’s design studio supplies the typefaces for brands from Fender to PayPal. We visit the practice to see how fonts find their own way.
The work of a good type designer is often easy to overlook. “It’s like I’m a brickmaker and graphic designers are architects,” says Kris Sowersby, the founder of Wellington-based Klim Type Foundry. “I supply materials for them to make stuff out of.” Those materials are used by significant brands and organisations, from The Frick Collection in New York to instrument maker Fender; you’ve probably seen the foundry’s work in PayPal’s user interfaces, on Transavia airlines billboards, on drinks labels, on book covers and more. Monocle uses his typefaces Domaine, National and Söhne for our commercial collaborations.
Klim operates out of the Font Bunker, a studio at the bottom of a long, steep driveway near Wellington International Airport. In the compact space, a wall holds hundreds of typography books, including rare catalogues and antique type specimens.
Sowersby consults this resource while developing designs such as the sharp serif Signifier, which he describes as “a brutalist response to 17th-century typefaces”. His process can take four to 10 years, from beginning to end. “The gap between what’s in my head and what comes out is often pretty big. I have come to accept that fonts find their own way. At a certain point, a typeface develops its own voice.”
But the wait is usually worth it, especially since letterforms help to shape the way in which a piece of writing is received. A rounded sans serif might feel friendly while Helvetica could convey Swiss precision. Typefaces can also reflect authority and convey brand identities. Sowersby’s current project with Maori artist and designer Johnson Witehira asks a simple question: what might New Zealand’s letterforms look like if they had emerged from Maori culture? The duo studied traditional tattoos, wood carving, weaving and early handwriting, and Sowersby translated these visual cues into type. The results include chevrons in the crossbars of the letters A and H, plus ligatured digraphs (a pair of letters fused together). “A student could use it instead of Times New Roman and feel that their work is from New Zealand,” says Sowersby.
The Maori typeface isn’t one of the 26 on sale at Klim’s website but you can find a trove of information there about his work, dissecting a practice that’s part historical study, part creative process. “Typefaces,” he says, “reflect a culture’s priorities and aspirations.”
klim.co.nz
